The present invention relates to techniques for assisted network navigation. In particular, the present invention relates to methods for providing a user of the Internet with a guided tour of the World Wide Web (WWW) and to techniques for assisting in the navigation of Web objects spread among multiple Web sites; and even more particularly, to an intelligent Web browsing system that dynamically adapts a tour based on collected route information, touring statistics, or similarity to to one or more like-minded users.
What is a Web page today? Today, a user experiences the Web in an a-temporal fashion through the use of Web objects. Web objects are uniquely identified by unique resource locators (URLs). URLs and their associated bookmarks are the basic mechanisms of exchange among users. There are three fairly obvious existing methods to guide a Web surfing session that spans multiple Web sites (hereinafter referred to as touring). One is simply to create an HTML file with commentary and links to the sites on the tour. Of course, in this case one must back up from each site to be presented with the next link. Another way is to make copies of all pages on the tour, save them on your own Web page, and modify them as suits your purposes. A third way is described in te aforementioned co-pending patent application Ser. No. 08/969,623, entitled xe2x80x9cHTML Guided Web Tour,xe2x80x9d filed Nov. 13, 1997, IBM Docket No. EN997116, by W. J. Roden, et al. Here, a static tour is presented wherein the system guides the users through a tour by displaying a given sequence of Web objects along with corresponding teaching Web objects. Users desire the ability for more complex forms of asynchronous interactions [see e.g., Manohar and Prakash, xe2x80x9cThe Session Capture and Replay Paradigm for Asynchronous Collaborationxe2x80x9d, Proc. of the European Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work, September 1995, Sweden].
What is a tour? A tour refers to a collection of objects, e.g., Web objects (such as URLs) that are temporally ordered. A tour represents an interactive visitation pattern over a dynamic collection of Web objects (for example, objects such as Web pages). A tour is different from a Web page. Tours are composed of two or more Web objects, which in turn, could be each a Web page. However, Web objects are used herein to represent any sort of Web resource that can be referenced through a handle such as a universal resource locator (URL). Furthermore, a tour is logically different from an arbitrary collection of Web objects such as a Web site. Tour objects can span multiple Web sites with intertwined links. The tour presents a view to an augmented virtual Web site across multiple underlying Web sites that spans coordinated visitation patterns that may not be present or realizable without copying the objects from the original sites. A tour is also different from a collection of URL bookmarks. Unlike a collection of bookmarks, a tour associates a temporal ordering with the presentation of Web objects that recreates a time-constrained visitation pattern across the collection of Web objects in the tour.
Hypermedia systems that allow the user to navigate through large amounts of on-line information are known to be a promising method for controlling the overwhelming increase in information available to the user. While most paper documents lead the user down a rigid sequential path, hypertext documents provide users with a means to choose one of many different paths. Hypertext is a familiar term used to describe a particular form of organization and user presentation of information within a computer-implemented system and is a familiar element of the broader class of systems referred to herein as hypermedia. Hypermedia exploit the computer""s ability to link together information from a wide variety of sources as a tool for exploring a particular topic. The data object is said to reside at a xe2x80x9cnodexe2x80x9d and may vary in size and type. Each data object is essentially self-contained but may contain references to other such objects or nodes. Such references are normally used in a hypertext document and are referred to as xe2x80x9clinksxe2x80x9d. A link is a user-activated control reference that causes the data object at the link target node to be displayed. By following these links from panel to panel, the user xe2x80x9cnavigatesxe2x80x9d through and about the hypertext document. This scheme provides user-control over the order of information presentation and permits the user to select what is of interest and how to pursue a given topic. An introductory treatment of hypertext is provided in xe2x80x9cHypertext: An Introduction and Surveyxe2x80x9d, IEEE Computer, J. Conklin, Vol. 20, pp. 17-41, (1987), and is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
The World Wide Web is a hypertext-based information service that makes collections of information available across the Internet. It allows Web browser clients to access information from any accessible Web server and supports multiple media types. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is used to describe static text documents, and a Web browser is essentially an HTML interpreter. A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is basically a network location which tells the user not only where something is (its address), but also what it is. The basic form of a URL address is service://hostname/path which identifies what Internet service is needed to reach the resource, what computer it is located on, and enough detail to find what is being searched for. By clicking on a hypertext link in one Web page, the user can display another related Web page or even invoke a related program. With the explosion of information on the World Wide Web, there are many potential new users who would like to search for information on the World Wide Web. The problem is that there is no effective interactive system for guiding a user through a tour of the World Wide Web which uses actual Web pages. The existing art minimizes these problems by constraining the available choices in linking from one panel to another. This is done by providing only a few carefully chosen links to and from each panel. Thus, users are less likely to get lost or waste time exploring irrelevant nodes, but lack flexibility. The typical hypertext link profile is predetermined according to the system designer""s understanding of the typical user profile and is incorporated in the hypertext document with no provision for modification or weighted recommendation.
A tour is different from hyper-pathing over a closed collection of objects [see Vannebar Bush, xe2x80x9cAs We May think,xe2x80x9d The Atlantic, 1945]. Unlike a closed collection such as a hyperlinked stack of cards (also called hypercards), a need exists for a tour that applies over an open (dynamic) collection of objects whose membership in the collection varies over time (ephemeral membership). Because pathing in a closed collection is an internal attribute of the collection, the absence of an object with membership in the tour will break the continuity of the tour. Thus, a need exists for a tour that is a separate object from the collection itself, so that the continuity of the view imposed by a tour over the collection is unaffected by the absence of one or more of its objects. Moreover, a need exists for a tour that may span paths not present in the original underlying collection. On the other hand, a hyper-path must traverse physical links in the collection. Lastly, the notion of hyperpathing refers to sequential traversals over a hypergraph. The need remains for a tour that encompasses the temporal coordination of multiple such sequential traversals during the presentation of a tour, e.g., by a Web browser.
The prior art also includes mechanisms to present a tour of a static collection of Web objects of interest. For example, in xe2x80x9cHTML Guided Web Tourxe2x80x9d, filed Nov. 13, 1997, IBM Docket No. EN997116, by W. J. Roden, et al, a static tour is presented where the system guides the users through a tour by displaying a given sequence of Web objects along with corresponding teaching Web objects. The sequence is pre-constructed. It does not collect user statistics or provide different tour options, such as a short tour (with a fewer number of Web objects) or a long tour. In xe2x80x9cBrowsing the WWW by interacting with a textual virtual environmentxe2x80x94A Framework for Experimenting with Navigational Metaphors,xe2x80x9d in ACM Hypertext ""96, March 1996, pp. 170-179, by A. Diebeger, a text-only, but information-rich spatial user interface is described wherein objects and a location/room can be associated with pointers to WWW objects. Here, the tour concept is only a sequence of Web objects. No control mechanism is provided for the displaying of the Web objects, i.e., there is no control for the timing and synchronization of displaying the Web objects, e.g., to allow some of the objects to be displayed in parallel through multiple frames. Although a visiting count is collected on each room in the Dieberger paper, the need remains for feedback information based on a viewers previous route decisions during the tour to guide subsequent routing decisions on the remainder of the tour by learning from other viewers making similar routing decisions.
Thus, there is a need for an adaptive user interface simple enough for effective use in Web browsing systems, permitting a tour to be adapted to various users while retaining efficiency and flexibility. These and the related unresolved problems and deficiencies are solved by the present invention in the manner described below.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an interactive and customizable guided tour of some portion of the World Wide Web; and to monitor and dynamically adapt the tour in response to information such as the behavior of like-minded users; as well as provide recommendations during the traversal. A tour having features of the present invention includes one or more of the following features:
Two or more Web objects,
Allowance for side trips,
True visiting of Web sites,
Maps,
Pre-fetching of Web objects,
Insertion of interactive decision points,
Customized insertion of advertisements,
Simultaneous traversal of multiple hyperpaths,
Gathering of user touring statistics, and
Dynamic recommendation based on touring statistics.
Another object of the present invention is to enhance the use and exchange of bookmark lists in several ways. For example, the use of a touring server acting as an intelligent intermediary between touring clients and the Web, is introduced. The touring server provides important enhancements to touring clients not yet available to today""s Web browsers, including:
1. the touring server enables (browser-transparent) pre-fetching and integration over the visitation to Web objects from possibly different Web sites in a tour,
2. the touring server suggests temporal guidelines to the visitation order while making scheduling allowances for asynchronous user interactions,
3. the touring server creates a statistics gathering point to enable tracking of touring behavior across multiple touring clients,
4. the touring server acts as a control point to enable dynamic modification over the tour contents, and
5. the touring server enables the insertion of dynamically customized recommendations for individual touring clients based on statistics and profiles of touring clients.
The present invention resolves the above problems by adding several new user-interface features to a Web browsing system, thereby obtaining unexpected and beneficial results. The invention introduces the notion of a dynamically customizable tour of Web sites with learning capability and online recommendation based on user profiling, aggregated trends, and previous touring interests.
The dynamic customizable tour mechanism can be used to facilitate customization in E-commerce. A carefully designed dynamic tour can collect valuable customer information. This is a far better way to collect customer information as compared to asking customers to fill out questionnaires and forms, or explicitly rating preferences on a group of items like CDs or videos. For example, consider an apparel store or boutique engaging in E-commerce. It can provide a tour on the latest fashion show. The show can consist of multiple segments including casual wear, work clothes, evening wear, sports clothes, etc. Each segment can be shown with a choice of different details/length and with different price points, styles, designers and color/pattern combinations. Based on how a customer navigates through the fashion show, the store can get a rough profiling of the customer. This information can be used to customize a subsequent Web page presentation to the customer. The customization can include target advertisement and promotion to the customers based on the observed preference. Another example can be a Web site of a computer store. It can provide a Web tour on the latest PC technology, with tour segments on desktops, laptops, processors, printers, storage devices, displays, etc. It can compose the processors pages from Intel and AMD Web sites, printers pages from HP, Cannon, and Epson Web sites, removable storage device pages from Iomega and SYQUEST Web sites, etc. By observing how this PC technology tour is received by a user, valuable information can be gained on what segment and price range of the technology or product is of most interest to this user.
The present invention is directed to a system, method and computer program product to display a dynamic customized Web tour of Web objects. The system provides tracking on the customer touring behavior on route selection and/or object browsed to provide guidance information on the remainder of the tour. A Web site can provide tours using the touring mechanism to collect customer information and create a customized E-commerce environment with tailored Web pages, promotion and advertisement.
In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the Web browser is split so that it is presented two (or more) Web objects at once. To start the tour, the user points his or her browser at xe2x80x9chttp://www. . . . /start.htmxe2x80x9d, where xe2x80x9c. . . xe2x80x9d is the URL address of the Touring Server Web site desired.
For example, a dynamic customized tour (DCT) can include an arbitrarily complex visitation pattern over objects on the World Wide Web (WWW or Web). According to the present invention, a tour server streams a tour to one or more touring clients. During a tour, users experience a customizable traversal view of the Web (referred to as a tour). A tour can span multiple sites and integrate Web content in ways not originally envisioned by site authors. Touring can be interactive. Touring clients can arbitrarily stop during a tour and independently engage on the exploration (hereinafter referred to as a side-tour) of the underlying Web site as well as any other Web site. Furthermore, side-tours can be tours themselves. Touring clients involved in a side-tour can, at any point in time, resume touring by returning to the last known touring stop.
A preferred embodiment is directed to a system, method and computer program product for providing dynamic customized tours on the Internet (herein referred to as tour) and in particular, a network-assisted way to interactively reproduce complex visitation patterns for traversal of the Web. The present invention includes features that allow the re-creation, sharing, and exploration of some target experience during the navigation and surfing of Internet content.
Given a dynamic collection of Web objects with predefined links, the present invention has yet other features for navigating a pre-composed guided tour over the collection of Web objects. The tour may traverse not necessarily directly-connected Web objects and may include arbitrary sequential and parallel traversals of these Web objects. Furthermore, the tour display may be synchronized over one or more windows, e.g., where the Web objects potentially could come from one or more sources (Web sites).
A touring server and a touring client can be used to deliver the touring experience to a user through a traditional Web browser. The tour is displayed on a Web browser. A streaming method is provided to multiplex Web objects from one or more sources into a single browser window through the dynamic creation of multiple browser frames or multiple browser windows. The streaming method automatically streams the traversal of such path from the touring server to the touring client so that any or many such touring clients will experience the same traversal paths.
In one embodiment, the presentation of Web objects across browser frames is subject to timing control. The present invention has features for ordering inter-object references in a tour sequence p wherein each ordered element e in p can be associated with a value t(e) (herein referred to as the presentation duration of e), and a token list K. The present invention has other features for automatically displaying a tour p (hereinafter referred to as touring) using a Web browser in a touring client by traversing an ordered sequence of inter-object references (i.e., URL(a,b) where (a, b) are in p) and holding the presentation of each Web object for a duration of time close to that of its corresponding presentation duration (t(e)). We refer to the ability to present a tour with approximate timing behavior as the integrity of the presentation of the tour at a touring client. The present invention has still other features for preserving the integrity of the presentation of the tour at the touring client even if the user of a Web browser on the touring client intervenes or interacts during the tour.
The present invention has still other features for specifying interactivity points as statistics collection points and introducing dynamic recommendations over the navigation. Anchor pages are inserted to allow customization of the tour. An anchor page (which can be considered an interactivity point in the Web context) can provide users with various tour options. This can include the number of Web objects included in the tour (short tour vs. long tour), the number of concurrent windows displayed during the tour. It can also include different functionality options such as with or without audio or video, the resolution of the video, with or without graphics, the resolution of the graphics, with or without frames on the Web pages, etc. Furthermore, the touring client is capable of interacting with the tour stream and allows VCR functionality such as fast forward, pause, and resume over the presentation of the tour. Such network-assisted tours can be interactive. A path composed of multiple branches and simultaneous traversal paths is synchronized in the navigating browser. Users are enabled to individualize their touring experience of a shared tour by allowing user-driven takeover and branching-off the streamed tour at any point during the traversal of such path. If a user decides to branch out of the tour element (herein referred to as a sidetrip), the retrieved Web object branched to span a new browser window and the current streaming of the tour (herein referred to as touring) will be temporarily paused. A touring history frame in the tour browser window provides a return pointer so as to allow the user to resume the tour (after such side-tour). The user is returned to the point in the tour from which the sidetrip began. The user touring behavior is tracked by the tour displaying system to provide guidance and customization on route or option selection and advertisement insertion or promotion for the remainder of the tour. By maintaining statistics on touring behavior, the system can identify the preferred selection of a group of users which has shown similar touring behavior patterns or route selections as the current user at any stage of the tour, and provide the proper guidance or information to the current user.
The foregoing, together with other features and advantages of the present invention, will become more apparent when referring to the following specification, claims and accompanying drawings.